In a move sure to impress the folks at SETI, five students at Harvard decided to attempt to make friends with the aliens by sending one of mankind’s greatest inventions into the stratosphere.

Harvard University juniors Renzo Lucioni, Nuseir Yassin, Daniel Broudy, Jamie Law-Smith and Matt Moellman put their pricey educations to good use by launching a hamburger into space as part of a project they dubbed Operation: Skyfall. The launch, which took place in Sturbridge, Mass., was made using a burger from a local establishment, b.good burger, whose owner, Jon Olinto, jumped at the chance to become a fast food space pioneer and wrote a check for $1,000 to finance the experiment, ABC News reported.

To prepare for the launch, the students glued the layers of a two-day old burger together and coated it in with varnish. Then the burger was attached to a weather balloon filled with helium. The sandwich — along with a GoPro camera to record the feat and a GPS tracking device — was then launched heavenward. As seen in the video, the hamburger rose to an altitude of nearly 100,000 feet before the balloon popped and sent the sandwich plummeting to earth.